Us Foreign Policy After The War In Vietnam

U.S. Foreign Policy After the War in Vietnam The direction of U.S. foreign policy was affected further by the onset of the Cold War, the post-1945 struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. In March 1947, when President Harry S. Truman announced that the United States would lead a global effort to combat Communism, both Congress and the American public rallied to his support. Trumans new policy later became known as the Truman Doctrine.

Truman instituted a policy of containment to thwart Soviet expansion efforts. That policy led the United States into forging a series of military alliances around the world. The country also started to provide substantial amounts of foreign aid to friendly nations, and to alert the American public and the world to the dangers of Communism. Trumans policy led the United States into a series of conflicts, including the Korean War (1950-1953) and the Vietnam War (1959-1975).

mass public opinion regarding the nations behavior abroad, like American foreign policy itself, can be expected to manifest both consistency and coherence on the one hand, and inconsistency and incoherence on the other. Typically, however, the latter descriptions have dominated discussions of the nature of mass foreign policy attitudes and have in turn been used to deprecate the role of public opinion in the foreign policymaking process. The reasons can be found in the well-established beliefs that the American people are uninterested in and ill informed about foreign policy, with a corresponding penchant to evince unstable foreign policy attitudes highly susceptible to manipulation by political elites.

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USGOALS and VITALINTERESTS/USRELATIONS, the two attitude dimensions most closely related to the theme of globalism characteristic of postwar American foreign policy, also help to define the cooperative international dimension in 1974 and 1978. In fact, it is interesting to note that in the 1970s the cooperative internationalism dimension is most important in defining the orientation of the mass public toward world affairs, but in the 1980s it is militant internationalism. These findings are consistent with the general orientation toward world affairs held by the Nixon-Ford-Carter presidencies, on the one hand, and the Reagan administration on the other. The fact that USGOALS and VITALINTERESTS/USRELATIONS account in large part for the shift from the dominance of cooperative internationalism to militant internationalism also has face validity in that the Reagan administration characteristically defined the foreign policy interests of the United States overseas more broadly than did its predecessors, for whom the Vietnam syndrome, symbolized by the Nixon Doctrine, seemed to dictate a lower profile and less active U.S. role in world affairs. The foregoing demonstrates unambiguously that the American people no longer embrace a uni-dimensional internationalist-isolationist orientation toward world affairs.

Instead, internationalism now has two faces: a cooperative face and a militant face. Attitudes toward communism, the use of military force abroad, and relations with the Soviet Union are the principal factors that distinguish proponents and opponents of the two faces of internationalism. The two faces of internationalism yield four distinct attitude clusters or foreign policy belief systems that have proven to be invariant temporally. Consistent with traditional views of Americans’ attitudes toward the role of the United States in world affairs, internationalists are those who support active American involvement in international affairs, favoring a combination of conciliatory and conflictual strategies reminiscent of the presumed pre-Vietnam internationalist foreign policy paradigm. Isolationists, on the other hand, oppose both types of international involvement, as we would expect. The two remaining groups, appropriately regarded as selective internationalists, are presumed to be newly emergent in the 1970s. Accommodationists embrace the tenets of cooperative internationalism but reject the elements implicit in militant internationalism, while hardliners, on the other hand, manifest just the opposite preferences. We can hypothesize that these selective internationalists have been important in coloring the domestic context of American foreign policy in the post Vietnam era, for while both groups are appropriately described as internationalists, their prescriptions for the U.S. world role often diverge markedly, thereby undermining the broad-based domestic political support the foreign policy initiatives that presidents in the Cold War era could count on and complicating the task of coalition-building that more recent presidents have faced.

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Beginning in 1978 Americans were asked in each of the Chicago Council surveys if (and how strongly) they agreed with the statement that The Vietnam War was more than a mistake; it was fundamentally wrong and immoral. Nearly 80 percent embraced that view in 1978, over three-quarters did so in 1982, and just over 70 percent did in 1986. The clear inference is that judgments about the war in Southeast Asia have had a continuing impact on Americans foreign policy thinking. More intriguing are the findings on the relationship between Americans foreign policy beliefs and their judgments about the war itself. Here the data indicate a decisive shift away from an internationalist judgment in 1978 that the Vietnam War was not morally wrong. Partisan and ideological differences on this issue have been clear and unchanged throughout, with Democrats and liberals more likely than Republicans and conservatives to view the war as wrong and immoral. As the axis of judgment shifts from the traditional internationalist isolationist fault toward the divisions inherent between the two groups of selective internationalists, it appears that even as the memory of Vietnam fades, divisions over the war may have become more deep-seated and politicized, not less.

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The impact of the lessons of Vietnam on American foreign policy has commanded considerable attention by journalists and political analysts. The Vietnam War stands as the preeminent instance of interventionism in recent American foreign policy. So profound are its effects that they are hypothesized to have been a primary catalyst underlying the breakdown of the presumed foreign policy consensus of the Cold War years and the bifurcation of Americans foreign policy beliefs. There is much in the history of the foreign policy disputes unfolding during the fifteen years following the withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam consistent with the proposition that the absence of a domestic consensus has colored not only the rhetoric of American foreign policy but its content as well. President Carters inability to win approval of the SALT II treaty and President Reagans inability to deal more harshly with the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua come readily to mind. The analyses in the previous section reinforce with systematic evidence the conclusion of many observers that a consensus about the appropriate role of the United States in world affairs has not existed for many years. Although there are some issues on which the American people are joined in an internationalist thrust reminiscent of the presumed consensus of the Cold War years, there are many others in which the elements of conflict and cooperation around which the consensus was built tend to divide rather than unite. The result, noted at the outset of this chapter, is that presidents today must build coalitions of support for their foreign policy initiatives, for they cannot count on that support in the same way that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson once could. Although the correlation between the absence of consensus and policy failures like those experienced by Presidents Carter and Reagan is clear, drawing causal connections between them is more difficult.

Elite dissensus arguably plays itself out in Congress, but why should presidents care about mass foreign policy beliefs? Conventional wisdom holds that public opinion sets the boundaries on permissible foreign policy behavior, thereby constraining the alternatives from which a president might choose. But because these limits are known to be more elastic than fixed (perhaps because of the way political and media elites present and interpret information), they are at best viewed as postponing rather than limiting factors in the political process. The principal finding of the study is that the American people, both the mass public and leadership segments, are divided not only over whether the United States should be involved in world affairs but also how. They have been divided since the Vietnam War, if not before. Internationalism now wears two faces, a cooperative face and a militant one, as the arrows and the olive branch around which Americans were once united now divide them. Attitudes toward communism, the Soviet Union, and the use of American troops abroad consistently distinguish proponents and opponents of the alternative forms of international involvement. Moreover, the divisions have proven to be remarkably stable over diverse circumstances (and, for that matter, measurement strategies).

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Nothing seems to have been capable of shocking the public psyche into new forms of thinking in the same way that the trauma of Vietnam and related developments of the early and mid-1970s seem to have caused a breakdown of the Cold War foreign policy consensus and a fundamental restructuring of Americans’ foreign policy beliefs. Historical evidence focused on the threat of communism, the use of force, and cooperation with the Soviet Union supports the conventional wisdom that a foreign policy consensus in popular opinion once existed, but it is less than clear-cut in demonstrating that the Vietnam War was the causal agent in its demise. Erosion of public support for the premises of the Cold War foreign policy consensus is evident nonetheless. To conclude, American foreign policy since Vietnam has become the object of partisan and ideological dispute. Evidence pointing toward the Vietnam War as a watershed in American foreign policy is clearest in public attitudes toward the use of force abroad, and the continuing impact of the war is reflected in the widespread judgment that the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral. Differences on the question fall along the hardline-accommodationist fault and reflect sharply divergent partisan and ideological judgments.

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Bibliography: Wittkopf, Eugene. Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, Duke University Press, 1990..

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